Moonlight and Gold

found, lost and unknown

Fiction

Gold dust on sheep’s wool shimmers in late afternoon sun. The air is hot and hazy. He’s thirsty, the red cotton of his California prospector’s shirt is stained with sweat. He’s seeing things, mind so fevered he sees gold on the fleeces of the ewes they’ve just mustered down from high pastures. Their wool has Inca depth, glimmer warmth, they shine across the last stretch of grass to the yards. It’s not just greed? Is it?

Butterfly Moon by Kirstie McKinnon, watercolour on paper

He shakes his head.

At the farmer’s homestead, there’s roast lamb, mashed potatoes and fresh peas for dinner. Beer is cooling in the shallow creek with-no-gold. He’ll swim, or at least splash and wash away the sweat of the day and the gleaming visions like ink-stained fingers tampering his mind. He’s seen men go mad. Leave their children to starve while they chase a line of starlight. These men make him afraid of what he could become. He thinks of Elizabeth, the promises they’ve made. He has a gift for finding gold. He knows that. So he practises walking away when he has a percentage, while the strike lies quiet and the mystery remains. He has nearly enough to propose to Elizabeth. One more good strike, then he’ll walk away. 

‘The first piece you find, you give away,’ the Māori navigator had said when George asked about the shining moon-grey stone the navigator wore around his neck, ‘Or greed grows in your heart like a tangled weed,’ the man had mimed choking himself, then curled a fist around the stone, ‘My cousin gave me this pounamu when we were boys. The boulders of the Arahura tumble in it, when I hear them call, I return home.’

Jack had been there, on the ship, listening quietly to the navigator as he told his story. George had given his first New Zealand nugget to Jack. ‘No choking,’ George had said as the metal tapped the centre of Jack’s palm. Jack had given his first-find, a small pouch of tiny grains to George, ‘No weeds,’ Jack had said.

The last of the sheep are in. The farmer has retrieved the beer. Jack and the others are walking slowly to the homestead. George will follow soon.

The muster has been good honest work. Jack’s idea because they’re low on food. George’s body aches with a physical fatigue he craves.  

He strips down and sluices himself in the bracing stream, scoops water and examines his lined palms. So many paths. The lanolin from sheep’s wool has greased his hands. His brain’s so fevered he sees the flicker of gold dust caught in the lifelines of his palms, in the offshoots and branches. Maybe he should go back to the States, stop this obsession. He’s going —

He vaults out of the stream and sprints naked to the fenced yard of Corriedales. The sheep cluster together, quiet and tired, some drink from a wide stone trough. The last rays of sunlight drape the backs of the animals. They shimmer. Can’t be. He brushes his wet hand across the fleece of the closest ewe, and stares at the chalk fine grains on his palm. Their fleeces are dusted with gold. 

Where have the sheep been? He closes his eyes. The lay of the land forms in his mind, clearer than any drawn map. A path crystallises, pristine as the constellations he’ll track through the night. It’s a waning gibbous moon and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

He schools himself to walk sedately back to his clothes. Pulls them on, doesn’t look back at the flock, not once. He’ll signal quietly to Jack using the almost-nothing hand gesture they’ve worked out. They’ll travel tonight while everyone else sleeps, back along the sheep tracks to that small canyon where the sheep had rested in the shade. He thinks of a joke he can tell over dinner and walks up to the weatherboard house with a wide veranda. 

He might build himself a house like this one day.

*

Reality

The thing with research is, you never know quite where it will take you. I’d been searching in New Zealand heritage encyclopaedias for old drawings of the moon from a Southern Hemisphere perspective. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find George Fairweather Moonlight and Jack Tarran. Friends and gold mining buddies. And somewhere down the research rabbit hole, I read a story about George Moonlight finding a seam of gold because he noticed some sheep had gold dust on their fleeces.

I don’t know why, but for a while after reading the old newspapers, I felt sad about all the gold leaving the earth. The pages contained a vision of a New Zealand I didn’t know, one where gold flaked the ground, eddied into the air and ran glittering through streams. I started to wonder if the soil needed the gold somehow, in a way we don’t know about? I had a kind of waking dream that we put the gold back, burying big the big cheese-block shapes into the earth with reverence and homage. This vision made me laugh; and perhaps has more to do with the hope of ceasefire in those countries at war. Gold back in the earth as a metaphor for longing-for-peace? A return to a sacred respect for life. The loss no more. Possible? Please.

*

I don’t know why I’m writing about gold, George Moonlight and Jack Tarran, so I go outside and prune my roses. While I’m outside pruning the garrulous climbing rose Compassion, my neighbour and I chat in the sun. This is better. Chatting in the sun is warmer than writing. It’s effusive and full of potential spring petals. We talk about the grief inside moments of joy, how we try to hold this-experience, cling to it, knowing all the while: it will pass. The pile of rose clippings rises. I dream of the blooms to come. I try to find beauty in the clean clear cuts I make in the wood. The rounds indicating years and the passage of sap.

‘I’ve been writing about the gold rush,’ I say to my neighbour, with an I’m-such-an-idiot eye roll, ‘I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this story.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘One interesting gold-rush person you could write about is George Fairweather Moonlight.’

I stop breathing and my heart kicks into a high-tap pace. I grab my head, realise I’m wearing a beanie and pull it off. The rainbow beanie, when did I put that on? Was it cold? The air shimmers around my neighbour. Her words, I can see them like a ripple of warm air, they channel towards me alive, over the gate across the fence, I have to sit down, can I sit down? ‘What?’

‘George Fairweather Moonlight. Most people haven’t heard of him, but Moonlight Macrae’s school is named after him. He was my great, great, great grandfather’s cousin. My cousin I guess. Distantly. Definitely the most interesting of my ancestors.’

Now I really do sit down but then my neighbour disappears behind the high gate, I can’t see her anymore and feel bereft as if the most important conversation I can possible have that day has been cut off. Mercifully, she opens the gate and we sit cross-legged on the gravel in the sun. My three dogs potter over and lick her.

‘I’ve been writing about George Fairweather Moonlight all morning,’ I say.

‘Really. That’s amazing,’ she says.

‘Yes. A fictional version though.’

My neighbour is a proper historian. We talk about how when we read history, the people seem alive. ‘I write this thing about historical kindness,’ I tell my neighbour, ‘But, I don’t know if George Moonlight was kind.’ I’ve thought about this before, how I need to find kind people; and how all of us contain light and shadow.

‘He named quite a few places,’ my neighbour says, ‘I used to think about him when I was a backpacker tramping through the forest. My Mum did heaps of research about him.’

‘There’s a photograph of him,’ I say, ‘With a dog slavishly resting its head on his thigh. Perhaps he was kind to animals?’

‘The one with a hunting dog? I think I’ve seen it. Yes.’

‘I always want to find out the character of a person,’ I say, ‘And most often the historical documents have facts and dates, but not character.’

‘Yes, and that’s the one thing as historians we are absolutely not allowed to infer or make up.’

I return to the sources. George Moonlight stopped a fight, was loyal to his friends, travelled alone by moonlight. He named creeks and found routes for roads. He found gold, but only ever took a portion, leaving the strike area when others crowded in. He built a home and a business which he ran with wife Elizabeth and his two children as they grew. He was a quasi-sheriff in Murchison where he settled. He was trusted. When Elizabeth died of typhoid; and then soon after George lost his business in a flood, his peers reluctantly declared him bankrupt. He went searching for gold again one cold winter in July 1884, and never returned. It’s this part of George Moonlight’s story that got me thinking about search and rescue, the subject of my last post.

Jack Tarran searched for George Moonlight for three months, finally finding him near, but not close enough to, a track, curled in on himself. George Moonlight had died of exposure. He was in his mid-fifties.

I return to my paintings of the moon. Even with the incredible discovery that my neighbour is George Moonlight’s cousin, I’m still not sure why this story has called to me from the past like a stone calling me to its river. Like flowerbeds which draw me out into the garden, maybe not-knowing helps me travel out into the world.

Detail from Drafting Moons by Kirstie McKinnon, watercolour on paper

Notes and Sources

Not alone

• I’m very grateful to my neighbour for sitting in the sun with me that day and talking.

• Huge thanks to the exceptional heritage librarian Barbara Blake for finding the newspaper reference to the gold-dust on sheep story, when my shoddy research methods let me down.  

• I’m grateful to the Rising Strong by Brené Brown Book Study Group. All I can say is: if you’re thinking of starting a book group that stays with one book for 6 weeks - it’s an awesome thing to do, a treasure trove. 

• It’s incredible to know that if you’re lost today LandSAR search and rescue teams will look for you, and for me. Thank you to Sonia Evers and the many volunteer searchers out there. Here’s a link to my last post Search and Rescue.

Some source material

• The Prow has the best bio I could find of George Moonlight, and it has the picture with the dog.

• Here’s a link (thanks to heritage librarian Barbara Blake) to a 1937 article with the gold dust on sheep reference, but it’s a bit of a mash-up of stories, and not accurate. According to the inquest George Moonlight appeared to have died of exposure, and was uninjured.

• George’s heydays.